Ex-prosecutor challenges claim that gun ownership doesn’t help women stay safe

Attorney and former Wisconsin prosecutor Tom Grieve says this whole video started with a meme from Moms Demand Action.

The group claimed, “There is no research to support the notion that owning a gun improves safety for women.”

Grieve tells his viewers that statement is not just wrong, but directly contradicted by piles of data from academia and government sources.

He says he can’t even fit all of it into one episode and has to leave “so much of it out” just to keep the video watchable.

His main goal, as he explains it, is simple.

Show how firearms actually do improve a woman’s safety, using the very statistics gun-control advocates like to say don’t exist.

From there, he walks through defensive gun use numbers, injury rates, sexual assault data, and trends in female gun ownership.

And when you line those numbers up the way he does, the Moms Demand Action claim starts to look more like a slogan than a serious statement.

What Tom Grieve Says The Data Really Shows

Grieve starts with defensive gun use.

He says there are about 1.2 million defensive gun uses per year in the United States by women alone.

Out of those, he notes, roughly 200,000 are specifically to defend against rape or sexual assault.

To him, that’s hundreds of thousands of real-world situations where women clearly decided a firearm was their best tool against a violent attacker.

Grieve then moves to injury risk.

He says the data show women are 250% more likely to be injured if they go along with their attacker instead of using a firearm in self-defense.

He adds that women are 400% more likely to be injured if they resist physically without a gun compared to when they use a firearm.

In other words, he argues, “just comply and you’ll be safer” isn’t just outdated advice – it’s statistically backwards.

Grieve points out that similar patterns apply to men as well.

He cites numbers showing that male victims are 140% more likely to be injured if they comply, and about 150% more likely to be injured if they fight back without a gun.

Taken together, he presents this as a simple conclusion. If you truly care about reducing harm in violent encounters, the numbers favor armed self-defense, not passive compliance.

From a common-sense standpoint, that tracks. It’s hard to imagine telling a smaller, physically weaker person that their safest option is to trust the mercy of someone who already chose to attack them.

Sexual Assault: Where The Numbers Get Stark

Grieve says the picture gets even sharper when you zoom in on sexual assaults.

He calls the statistics “shocking,” especially after seeing these cases firsthand as a state prosecutor.

According to the data he cites, if a woman offers no resistance during a sexual assault, the average completion rate is about 88%.

If she tries to rely on crying, pleading, or reasoning with her attacker, he says that completion rate actually rises to 96%.

In other words, the “talk him down” strategy rarely works the way people hope.

Grieve sounds genuinely disturbed by that number.

If a woman screams or tries to draw attention, he says the completion percentage falls to around 44–50%.

If she manages to run away, it drops further to around 15% — assuming she’s fast enough and has a path to escape.

But the number that Grieve really drives home is what happens when a gun is involved.

He says the completion rate for sexual assault in cases where the woman uses a firearm is about 0.1%.

He emphasizes that figure slowly: zero point one.

That’s effectively a rounding error compared to all the other categories.

Grieve ties that back to the earlier statistic: roughly 192,500 women per year using firearms to stop or scare off would-be rapists.

To him, that’s not just theory – that’s evidence that guns are absolutely making a difference in real assaults.

It’s hard to look at a drop from 88%–96% completion down to 0.1% and honestly say “guns don’t improve safety for women.”

You might still dislike guns, but you can’t pretend that gap isn’t huge.

Why So Many Women Are Buying Guns Now

Grieve then steps back and looks at long-term trends in women and gun ownership.

He says that in 1980, only about 10% of women in the United States owned firearms.

Over the last 44 years, he explains, that number has jumped roughly 250%, bringing female gun ownership to around 25% of U.S. women – about 42 million as of 2024.

He argues that this is not a fringe movement anymore; it’s tens of millions of women making a conscious decision about their own safety.

One of the most striking points he makes is about new gun buyers.

Grieve says that between 2019 and 2021, nearly 50% of first-time gun buyers were women.

That momentum, he notes, kept going into 2022–2024, with about a 13% increase in female firearm ownership in that period alone.

In his view, women aren’t waiting for permission anymore – they’re quietly joining the gun community in huge numbers.

He also breaks down why women own guns. According to Grieve, about 92% of women gun owners cite protection as their primary reason, roughly the same as men at 91%.

But he says 27% of women list personal safety as their only reason for owning a firearm, compared to just 8% of men.

To him, that shows women see the gun as a direct answer to vulnerability, not a hobby or a status symbol.

If you look at the culture shift, it makes sense.

Women are being told to be independent, walk alone, live their lives – and many of them clearly want a tool that lets them do that on their own terms.

Defensive Gun Use Is More Common Than People Think

Grieve then takes aim at a familiar anti-gun talking point: that guns in the home cause more harm than good.

He says that’s only true if you ignore defensive gun use.

He walks through a set of numbers: combining accidental gun deaths, suicides, and homicides, he comes to just under 30,000 firearm-related deaths in the U.S. per year.

But then he compares that to about 390,000 lives protected or preserved through defensive gun use.

That works out to a 13-to-1 ratio in favor of gun ownership, as Grieve frames it.

And he openly says he’s being conservative and could have used other studies that suggest the ratio is closer to 22 to 1.

To back that up, he cites the 2013 CDC study ordered under President Obama, which reported possible ranges of 2.5 to 3 million defensive gun uses per year.

Grieve says most of those never show up in official stats because there’s no 911 call, no report, and no paperwork – just a threat deterred.

He offers a local example from Milwaukee, where police use “ShotSpotter” technology to detect gunfire.

Even when the system hears shots, he says, the 911 call rate is only around 5%, which shows how much armed activity never touches the official system.

Breaking it down another way, Grieve says there are about 5.7 defensive gun uses every minute in America.

And in roughly 88–91% of those cases, he says no shots are actually fired – just displaying the firearm is enough to end the encounter.

He notes that 78.4% of defensive gun uses happen in or around the home, with smaller percentages in public places and workplaces.

He adds that around 41.3% of active shooter events have been stopped by armed civilians, and that when you look outside gun-free zones, that number rises to 63.5%.

When you line all that up, the picture looks very different from the usual headlines.

Most news stories focus on the worst misuses of guns, not the countless times a gun quietly prevents something terrible from happening.

A Different Way To Talk About Safety And Equality

Grieve closes with two quotes that sum up how he sees the issue.

One is from Annie Oakley, who said she’d like to see every woman handle firearms as naturally as they handle babies.

The other is a modern saying he shares: “The firearm makes a woman equal to a man, and it is better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it.”

That theme of equality through capability runs through his entire video.

He’s not pretending guns are magic or risk-free.

What he’s arguing is that in a world where evil people exist, a firearm is often the only thing that truly levels the playing field for women.

Looking at the statistics he lays out, it’s hard to claim with a straight face that there is “no research” showing guns improve women’s safety.

You can debate policy, training, storage, or culture – but the raw numbers he cites do show real defensive benefits.

My own takeaway is that this conversation needs to be more honest on both sides.

If we’re going to talk about “following the science,” we can’t ignore data just because it supports armed self-defense.

For many women, especially those who know they won’t win a physical fight, a firearm is not about politics.

It’s about having at least one tool that turns them from a target into a person with a real chance to fight back – and, very often, survive.